Overwhelmed voucher systems in West Virginia, Arkansas leave thousands of homeschoolers hanging

Katie Switzer was part of a lawsuit defending West Virginia’s Hope Scholarship before the state Supreme Court when school choice opponents sued to block the program. Three of her five children use the ESA program. (Courtesy of Katie Switzer)

This story was updated at 5:05 p.m. and again at 5:23 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 9, 2024.

Two years ago, Katie Switzer advocated for a new school choice program that grants homeschooling families in West Virginia up to $4,900 to educate their children.

She was on the winning side when opponents sued to stop the program. But now, she says, the story of the Hope Scholarship has entered a frustrating new chapter.

Glitches in a new online purchasing system mean she can’t spend funds to order headsets for her three children in online classes. Her kindergartner received the wrong laptop and she spent weeks trying to get a refund. Her kids are among thousands whose learning has been disrupted this school year because orders for curriculum and supplies are backed up. Families have been forced to wait or spend their own money and ask the state for reimbursement.

“ We fought so hard to get this program,” said Switzer, a mother of five and founder of a Facebook group that has become a forum for dozens of families frustrated with the payment system. “Now we have a number of parents that haven’t received what they ordered.”

In April, the West Virginia State Treasurer’s Office, which runs the Hope Scholarship, awarded a nearly $10 million contract to Indiana-based Student First Technologies to manage purchases and payments to education providers, replacing a nonprofit the state contracted with last year. But the system has struggled to keep up as enrollment in the education savings account program jumped from about 6,300 students last year to over 10,000. In late September, almost 3,000 of the 9,000 orders submitted through the company’s platform had not been processed, according to the state. By Thursday, the system had gotten that number down to 1,600 out of 11,300 — or roughly 14% of orders.

Last week, the treasurer’s office held a forum to allow parents to voice their concerns. But Switzer said the meeting was short on hard information

“I’m like, ‘We want answers; we don’t just want to yell at you,’ ” she said.

Arkansas concerns

Student First’s problems aren’t limited to West Virginia. In a Sept. 16 letter , Arkansas Education Secretary Jacob Oliva told CEO Mark Duran that his company failed to meet deadlines, including one for delivering a “fully operational” purchasing platform for homeschool families participating in the state’s Education Freedom Account program. He followed up with a second letter Tuesday, canceling the company’s contract as of Dec. 31 and requiring Student First to pay an estimated $593,000 in damages.

On Wednesday, the state also posted a new bid for another vendor.

Arkansas, where the Education Freedom Account program provides $6,800 per student, awarded a $15 million contract to Student First in April, replacing ClassWallet, the largest company in the sector, with contracts in 11 states.

The program began in 2023-24, but this is the first year some homeschoolers can participate, including the children of first responders, servicemembers and those in failing schools.

“Not all homeschool families are eligible this year, and it’s really a good thing” given the processing delays, said Lisa Crook, director of Education Alliance, a network of Arkansas homeschooling families. Parents are calling her for answers, but she said the state is reimbursing expenses as fast as it can. “It has been frustrating, but I don’t feel like they have turned a blind eye to us or anything.”

Student First officials have not returned phone calls or emails for this article.

As Republican-led states continue to adopt and expand education savings accounts, also known as voucher programs, they are building centralized systems for homeschooling parents to buy curriculum, services and supplies.

Controversy surrounding ESAs has largely focused on isolated cases of fraud, including funds for “ghost students” in Arizona and extravagant parent-purchased items like ski passes and espresso machines . But school choice advocates argue that one of the biggest threats to the programs is poor customer service, including online platforms that malfunction or block orders for items that should be allowable.

Parents are complaining about “long approval wait times and issues with getting invoices paid,” said Mike McShane, director of national research at EdChoice, an advocacy group. “It is tough to say whether it is the platforms or the states that are causing the problems. I imagine if you ask the platforms they’ll blame the states, and if you ask the states they’ll blame the platforms.”

The West Virginia treasurer’s office did not respond to requests for comment.

Last year, McShane urged states not to skimp on the “slow, laborious and dull work” of implementation. He called the difficulties “teething pains” as states open programs to more families.

‘Through the roof’

Under ESAs, parents can use their accounts to pay for tuition at private schools, or to fund homeschooling expenses or a mixture of in-person and online learning.

Recent data from Johns Hopkins University and other sources shows that homeschooling rates remain above pre-pandemic levels. In the 2022-23 school year, nearly 6% of students were homeschooled, compared with 2.8% in 2019. Researchers suggest ESAs “will potentially expand homeschooling practice even more.”

While it’s relatively simple to use voucher funds to pay tuition to a private school, advocates say Student First probably didn’t anticipate the flurry of activity from homeschooling families who often place dozens of orders for curriculum and supplies.

“The demand for these programs has been through the roof,” McShane said. “So scaling up the tech and infrastructure is going to take time.”

Critics, however, argue that such “middleman” vendors are not only causing headaches for families, but raising the costs of running the programs themselves. Iowa, for example, upped its contract with Odyssey, a similar payment company, to reflect additional charges for transaction fees on purchases.

Josh Cowen, a Michigan State University professor and leading school choice opponent, said it’s typical for states to contract with third-party providers to manage publicly funded programs. But Cowen, who recently published a book about some of the wealthy donors behind the school choice movement, pointed to a “chronic problem” with vendors running ESA programs, especially as the list of allowable items grows.

“I think that the burden should be even higher on states authorizing vendors to explain why we need them and why they’re worth the cost,” he said.

The West Virginia treasurer’s office has created some temporary workarounds. In a Sept. 23 email, the state said it would reimburse families that had to pay up front for expensive items like school uniforms and musical instruments. But advocates note that not all families can afford to pay for items out of pocket and wait for reimbursements.

In addition to the backlog of orders, Student First’s “TheoPay” platform, for now, only works as an extension to Chrome — a violation of its contract, which requires the program to work across multiple browsers and be mobile-friendly.

Switzer said parents who lack Chrome or home internet service have come to her house to place orders.

“This is a high-poverty state,” she said. “Parents can’t use their phones [to place orders] or they can’t use the local library computer to order stuff because you can’t install the Chrome extension on a library computer.”

As director of education partnerships and strategy at the Cardinal Institute for West Virginia Policy, a right-leaning think tank, Tiffany Hoben is an advocate for voucher programs.

She also has an 11-year-old son on a Hope Scholarship. She uses the funds to purchase science, math, and reading materials from different vendors and to pay for tutors. Student First’s website promises “frictionless technology.” But the system is blocking orders for some parents while green-lighting purchases from other families for identical items.

“It’s hard for families,” she said. “It’s like, ‘Well, dang it, I should be able to have this because it’s on the list.’ ”

‘In the dark’

Most states with voucher programs have had some challenges with their payment systems. But in Arizona, which contracts with ClassWallet, many of the kinks have been worked out, said Kathy Visser, who runs a Facebook group for ESA parents. If there are delays with approvals, it’s usually due to a backlog at the state level or because officials have changed the rules about what’s allowed.

“For the most part, if you contact ClassWallet with an issue, they’re very responsive,” she said. “And if it’s their fault that you had an issue, it’s quickly resolved.”

She worries that problems with vendors in other states will bolster critics’ arguments that voucher programs drain state resources.

“They’ll say, ‘Look, you can’t even manage the programs,’ ” she said. “They want to make sure parents quit using it. If parents get fed up, then the program fails.”

Hoben, with Cardinal Institute, said that in the rush to get West Virginia’s purchasing system in place, families have been kept “in the dark” about why their orders aren’t being processed.

“Other states,” she said, “are watching us out of the corner of their eye, like ‘God do we even want to mess with this?’ ”

This story was produced by The 74 , a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on education in America.